Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation Mereseini Vuniwaqa was surprised by the low turnout of people to their Ba Home Care Initiative station.

Now in its second day of operation, minis­try staff processing applications had earli­er anticipated at least 12,000 people to show up to the Ba Market Grounds.

“Well we expected a bigger crowd in Ba, but we were pleasantly surprised to come here,” Ms Vuniwaqa said.

“I think it was because it was also due to the fact that the teams that were working here prior to us doing the sweeping exer­cised had covered most of Ba, so this is ba­sically for those who missed out on that.”

Despite being the most-affected area, Ba had the least number of people turning out to the Homes CARE Initiative station well into midday yesterday.

One thing that was evidently clear was the effective organisation and management of the crowd by the Homes CARE personnel.

This was compared with stations in Si­gatoka, Nadi and Lautoka, where people flooded to the various booths, seemingly disorganised.

“We keep learning as we go from station to station. After every day we do a debriefing exercise where members of the team come up with the challenges they faced during the day and everybody gives their ideas on how we can make it better the next day,” Ms Vuniwaqa said.

“So it has been a learning experience for us as a ministry on dealing with these kinds of crowd.

“It has been a worthwhile experience.”

She said one reasons other stations were crowded was mainly because of misinfor­mation from other people.

“So when we give them the right informa­tion, most of them left because a lot of them really did not know. They just thought that it was a chance to get some money.”

The Homes CARE initiative team will move to Rakiraki once it completes process­ing applications in Ba.